Top National Brokers Website Reviews – Part II

Broker Specific Observations

As you can see the only firms whose sites fail our test completely are the banks – as their sites are nice if you have a bank account or mortgage with them but useless for insurance. Yes they have special insurance sites but they still are tough to use. There are a lot of great firms owned by Wells especially whose identity has been subsumed into this this large corporation (with the best logo ever). BB&T’s strategy of being a player in lots of small local markets probably benefits from their name whereas WellsFargo may not competing in the larger US cities.

Of the traditonal brokers Brown and Brown and USI both fail to deliver a site that supports the quality of their organizations. The cheetah growl for Brown and Brown’s site serves no purpose and USI’s site is as bland as is their description of their business – “diversified insurance and financial services firm focused on providing fully integrated distribution of general and specialty property and casualty insurance and financial services such as employee benefits outsourcing and related consulting.”

NFP also once again baffles me. Their site is very attractive but fails completely to explain to a potential customer why they add value. Their description of who they are is odd as well – “…distribution of financial services products”. This is the same firm as you recall from a prior post whose CEO refers to “same store sales” and dealing with “product manufacturers” in her annual report investor communication.

Gallagher’s site falls victim to the trying to be all things to all people, though they do have sites for the benefits and P&C businesses those are not where one goes when looking for them. Gallagher too has acquired a lot of great firms and subsumed their sites into generic pages like this one for The Stanton Group in Minneapolis. Stanton was a top 10 firm in Minneapolis Google ratings, the only one Gallagher had other than their headquarters address.

Hub and CBIZ do a very nice job overall in looking fresh, getting their message across and getting the viewer to the local office to service them.Good solid sites here that you can build on to make even more useful and visible on the web.

I have become a fan of “no nonsense” sites that simply tell you what they do and then do it. Segal does that well at the same time being attractive, easy to navigate and clear on why they provide customer value.They also have RSS feeds easily accessible for communication.

The new Lockton site does the same thing. It is very businesslike but upfront on who they are and what they do – “Global insurance, employee benefits, surety and risk management services for clients interested in the highest level of service.” It is well organized and even employs “Share This” to allow viewers to post pages to multiple social media tools, the only site to show any visible interest in the use of social media. With a few tweaks here and there they could have the best and most visible brokerage site on the web.